 Our next speaker, Katerina Borscht is the Chief Innovation Officer at Mozilla, another open source organization that has done an incredible job of keeping the web open and keeping innovation coming. So I'm very excited to introduce you. Please welcome Katerina. Thank you for coming. Good morning everybody. It is such a pleasure being here. I'm Katerina Borscht. I'm a recent immigrant from Germany and the media industry where I spent almost two decades developing or building digital news products and reader communities and I am actually very grateful that my culture shock is minimal compared to Dan Lyons culture shock when coming to Silicon Valley because while we at Mozilla do have a ball pit which led my mother to stop bragging about my career because by German standards once you have a ball pit you're not a serious professional anymore. We do not have cheers for peers instead we have really really angry discussions in the kitchen whether using slack over IRC leads you to lose all of your open source credentials which has recently happened to me. I've been involved with Mozilla for quite a while and joined their joined their board in 2014 and finally made the jump at the beginning of last year. As Chief Innovation Officer my scope or my mandate is really to think about how we invest and work with open methods and open innovation and a really crucial part of my work is ensuring the health of the Mozilla community and the growth of the overall Mozilla community and that's why I was really excited when Jim in his keynote on Monday stressed the importance of diversity because diverse communities usually make for stronger communities and when he announced yesterday that you would make public all of your learning materials and I'm really interested and I'm really excited about using that. I'm not putting up this picture to make most of us feel really really old I actually have a point with this because I believe to understand the culture we live and we work in nowadays we need to look back to the very beginning and 20, 25 years ago if you wanted to join the open source movement if you wanted to join the fight against big software you needed access and that meant access to hardware, access to the internet, access to enough spare time to be able to contribute and access to resources for travel and that kind of access was usually only available to a particular subgroup of the population and it was this particular subgroup that was rather homogenous that built the culture, the patterns, the kind of communication we still see to this day. I think the you and you merit study and I'm sorry I'm going to throw a little bit of data at you throughout my talk and quote a lot of studies. The study that I think some of you had a hand in writing called this the social and cultural arrangement of open source and it also identified that the kind of behavioral patterns were hostile towards women even though that was often unintentionally so. The culture that developed adopted meritocracy as an organizational principle which in theory makes a lot of sense it sounds very reasonable and it's not only open source Silicon Valley loves meritocracy but nowadays we know that while meritocracy works really, really well for men it's not evenly applied. There's a MIT study from 2010 that found that women do not reap the same rewards in a meritocratic organization and there's a study from 2009 from the Anita Bork Institute that pretty much found the same thing is true for underrepresented minorities and I'm sure that most of you will have seen the study that came out last year of the North Carolina State University together with GitHub that actually looked at how our contributions accepted and it found that contributions by women are accepted above average as long as they're not identifiable as women. Once it's obvious that you're a woman it is far less likely that your contribution is accepted and the difference between that is 10%. I hate to say it but that is huge and if we look at the numbers we know that 90% of applications and systems developers either are either white or Asian and in the overall industry they're 19% women. Don't get me wrong the industry that I come from the media industry at least in Europe these are outrageously great numbers compared to where we stand in the media industry and for over a decade I was always the only woman in the room and I probably own more pantsuits than Hillary Clinton so this to me looks really really great and when we look at the numbers from the Floss 2013 study it found that there about 11% women who actively contribute to open source communities and that is actually great progress because the same study in 2002 found only 1% women so in many ways there's a really great trajectory but I think we still have to realize that there is an underlying systemic problem because we still have many of the conditions that led to these monocultures and we still face many of the similar problems underrepresented minorities still have less access it's much harder for them to contribute and I'm not saying this to make a normative argument I don't want to be on the moral high ground this actually matters and it matters to our bottom lines and it matters to the work we do and the work that we really care about there's a study from McKinsey from 2014 that looked at the composition of leadership team in across different industries and it found it found that if you have gender diversity in your leadership team you have financial returns that are on average 15% higher than your industry median and it found that if you have ethnic diversity in your different levels of leadership team that advantage even increases now while it is fairly easy to measure financial returns it is much harder to find good measures for innovation and I know that innovation is like has been a buzz word for years and when I talk about innovation I don't we don't sit around in the ball pit I don't talk about lofty ideas this is really as many others have said this is about identifying real problems and solving real problems and why I'm probably the last person to advocate for patents as a really good innovation index there's yet another really interesting study from last year that looked that I think is an interesting indicator at least and it looked at the adoption of the employer non-discrimination act across US states and it found that those states that had adopted the non-discrimination act had 8% more patents and an increase of 11% in patent filings I have also learned a lot from the work that my successor on the Mozilla board did that's Karim Lakhani he's a professor at Harvard Business School and he has dedicated his entire career to researching open innovation and open source communities and some of the things he found are really really obvious because most of us have experienced them like open source is really really good at taking big problems breaking them down into small tasks which in turn allows a much larger a large larger pool of potential contributors to join but he has also identified some things that that we're not really good at and the main thing is we're we're still not very good at avoiding group thing and avoiding monocultures by bringing very different disciplines to the table but this is really really important in the problem-solving process and I think the UNU Merit study found something similar and and stated that the open source culture tends to value code over software and engineering over product and that leads to undervaluing other roles that are also really important in the work that we do and that you need to have at the table if you do want to build really good products and you know that's researchers, UX designers, marketers all the people that you do need if you really really want to reach your customers and this this actually has impact on our work this is super important but I think it also and it's not only important for attracting new pools new different kinds of people into our communities it is also really important for the second part of the equation that we don't often separate enough it's really important for ongoing retention and engagement of contributors and employees because we often tend to look at at the top of the funnel how can we attract more diverse people how do we get these people into our communities how do we welcome them and then we forget to look at the other side we also have to create a culture that retains them that keeps them engaged because we only look at the top of the funnel the numbers aren't going to change and whatever we do is not going to have the same impact so I want to briefly talk about what we have learned and what we're trying to do and I'm not even going to pretend that we have a silver bullet or that we're so much smarter I just wanted to briefly outline the things that we're doing and I will stop quoting studies so one of the most important things that we do I think is learning from others and I was reminded of this again when I joined the women in open source meeting on Monday night where this was a really big topic in my experience we're not even very good in our own organizations at learning from each other at adopting best practices I see us reinventing the wheel over and over again but it is even harder across organizations but I think this is really really fundamental to our our success it is fundamental to and that's even harder to also share our failures because I have usually learned way more from the dramatic failures in my life than the great successes and it's really important but to to share the lighthouses to share the best practices and to celebrate together so one of the things we have done at Mozilla for example is joined the outreach program that most of you will be familiar with that tries to lower the barrier of entry through paid internships for example another thing that we're currently doing is we had a large diversity and inclusion effort last year took all different kinds of internal measures focused on employees and we're now currently trying to figure out how can we take the many learnings from that and apply that to our communities because somebody said communities don't have HR departments and that is very true but I think we can take some of the learnings from our HR departments and also apply them to our communities the other thing that is really crucial and that is really important to me is designing with designing intentionally it is so hard to fix problems that have manifested over time in established communities and we clearly need to do that and we need to address the issues we have but we can avoid so much of the problems if we are very intentional about our values our principles up front and I think there are projects that demonstrate this really really well by making shared and inclusive values very explicit by having a code of conduct and by actually living that code of conduct I think a lot of it comes down to modeling the kind of behavior you want to see in your community and have that have the people that build these communities actually model that kind of behavior and so I think a code of conduct a diversity statement clearly shared values really really help and and I think we have great examples of that in the industry Ubuntu is a really good example of this or Mozilla's Rust project which has a really welcoming thriving successful community and last but not least be creative try different things that is one of my favorite parts of my work and I just want to give you a few examples of what we of what we are doing and one is Sarah Sharpe's FOSS heartbeat project that Mozilla is sponsoring and Sarah looks at the correlation between sentiment in a community and the contributor lifecycle the engagement the retention part of things and one of the projects she looked at is again the aforementioned Rust community and she found that Rust has a great thing that that I really really like and it's called the high five bot and it's a bot that welcomes new contributors and it's a bot that assigns reviewers and gives shout outs and while this might sound really really trivial she actually found that getting a shout out by by the high five bot increases your likelihood of having your code merged by almost 12 percent it's a small tweak but it actually has significant impact and so I really like and I actually love what we're learning through this project another thing I want to mention is another Mozilla project that Mozilla is leading together with the Knight Foundation the New York Times and the Washington Post and it addresses the reader communities on news sites which is which actually is an important part of the news business it's not just a hunting ground for trolls it's actually if you do it right it's an important part of your business and while this might sound like a very narrow slice I think what we have learned here a lot of what we have learned here is applicable across online communities whether it's political activist communities or open source communities and the coral project does not only do this lovely cards against community it also builds software it builds survey tools community moderation and community analytics tools but what I found really insightful is the way they approached this when they kicked off the project two years ago because they took a lot of time actually researching both sides of the equation the the needs and demands of newsrooms they interviewed over 150 newsrooms in 30 countries but they also took great care at trying to understand what are the expectations and the desires and the problems of of those commenting there and so they surveyed over 12,000 commenters and one of the one of the things they found that is probably not very surprising is that men and women have wildly different expectations as to online discourse and the satisfaction of readers in those communities varies wildly depending on the quality of the community moderation but the one thing that astonished me because there's been a long debate in the industry around anonymity and if we do away with anonymity everybody will become incredibly civilized and that's actually not the case one of the things they found is if you take away anonymity and implement some kind of real name policy the hostility the toxicity gets even worse in no small part because women underrepresented minorities now become easily identifiable and many of the unconscious biases that are at play become very obvious here so I all um I just invite you to take a look at that it's a it's a really great team with impressive work and last but not least I want to mention our equal rating innovation challenge which sounds way more complicated than it actually is um this is the way we try to address or tackle the question of how do we bring the next billion people online and how do we do that in a way that actually gives them access to the whole breadth and beautiful mess of the open web and not just to a small pre-selected zero rated slice of the internet like other companies do this really um goes hand in hand with our work on on net neutrality and when I joined at the beginning of last year um I because I knew this was um a big focus and important to Mozilla I stuck a whole bunch of the smartest people I could find in the organization into one room and not just like super smart developers user researchers UX designers I'm like yeah I've you know I've never worked with as many great and smart people we should be able to solve that but it became pretty apparent that it's not only quite presumptuous it's also really hard fixing problems from the confines of your cozy mountain view office that affect communities in rural India or Rwanda or Guatemala because um in that room I was the only person that had ever traveled to Africa and no matter how much research you do your perspective will always be very different so we made this an open challenge and we tried to reach out to a very global community and um connected with with technologists with entrepreneurs on the ground that really intimately knew um that really intimately knew the issues on the ground um and the complexity of that and we were quite overwhelmed with the response because when you run such a global challenge I didn't really know what to expect and we got um almost a hundred proposals or submissions from 27 different countries and the quality of the proposals and the quality of the teams participating was astounding um but one of the the best things about this is that it really um allowed us to connect to very very different people that we weren't connected to hopefully allows us to build um a long-term sustainable community um with these people with people that care about the open web um that care about bringing the next billion people online and one of the things that I have learned through this is it's it's quite obvious but it's different when you experience it the next generation of people coming online and potentially willing even eager to engage with us to contribute to our work they're not going to look like us they're not going to talk like us and they're going to have different expectations and if we want to future-proof our communities if we want to future-proof our work and everything that we really care about we need to engage those people we need to understand those people and we need to be able to open up our communities and embrace those people thank you very much so like let me just quickly say if you forget all the statistics that's perfectly okay if you um just remember like three things um try creative things and actually have fun doing it I think fun is such a crucial part of your work and not in the Silicon Valley beanbag way um be really really intentional about how you design things um how you design communities how you set up communication and please share your learnings and please start by reaching out to me either here in person or online in any form thank you so much